Richard Nyong’s secrets exposed

How crazy investors hid their wealth in Lekki Gardens.

Most business leaders guard their strategies like state secrets. Not Richard Nyong.

The CEO and founder of Lekki Gardens Estate, Dr Richard Nyong, OON, has told an audience at the University of Port Harcourt the unbelievable secret that made big-time investors put billions into their business.

Speaking at a special lecture held in honour of the outgoing Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Owunari Georgewill, Nyong argued that the highest measure of leadership is not the number of people who follow a leader, but the number of people, and even rivals, who become better because they observed the leader at work.

“Leadership is not measured by how many followers you have,” he said. “It is measured by how many people become better because of you. When your competitors begin copying your principles instead of merely your products, you have done something worthwhile.”

To illustrate the point, Dr Richard, a recipient of the national honour of the Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON), took his audience back fifteen years, to when he was a thirty-year-old entrepreneur trying to launch his first project, a 200-home estate in Ajah, Lagos.

At the time, he recalled, Lekki Gardens had no track record, no completed buildings, and no reputation. The road leading to the site was flooded and barely motorable. The company had only enough money to either construct three sample apartment blocks or build a one-kilometre access road that would serve the entire community, a road, he stressed, the company would never own and never directly earn a naira from.

His board of directors at the time, he joked, “consisted of my wife and I” chose the road.

“On paper, it was the most irrational business decision we had ever considered,” Nyong said. “It became the smartest.”

The projected three-year sell-out for the 200 homes, he told the gathering, happened in three months. “People kept saying, ‘If you could build that road, you would deliver my property’,” he recounted. Lekki Gardens went from unknown to market leader almost overnight.

Five years later, entering the Abuja market where a bigger competitor had struggled for three years to move units in the same location, the company doubled down on the same principle. It built a 1.5-kilometre road and a bridge into its new site. Three hundred homes sold in four months.

Then came the moment Nyong says validated the philosophy for good.

“Our competitor watched. They studied what we had done. Then they extended the same road by another two kilometres until it reached their own project — and they sold out too,” he said. “Most businesses fear imitation. I welcomed it. That is what leadership looks like.”

That single stretch of road, he added, has since helped transform what was once a forgotten corridor into one of the fastest-growing real estate locations in Abuja.

For Nyong, the lesson runs deeper than infrastructure. Leadership and giving back, he told the Uniport audience, are not separate ideas but “two sides of the same coin of impact”.

“Giving back is not an expense,” he said. “It is an investment in trust. An investment in people. An investment in the future. And unlike most investments, everyone benefits — the community, the customer, and even your competitors.”

He rounded off with a challenge to the students, faculty and dignitaries in the hall, many of whom had gathered to celebrate Prof. Georgewill’s tenure at the university: “The world has enough people trying to become influential. What it needs are more people willing to become useful. Influencefades. Titles change. Markets shift. Fortunes rise and fall. But when you improve the lives of others before improving your own position, people remember — not because you told them you were a leader, but because they experienced your leadership.”

The lecture drew sustained applause, particularly from students who lined up afterwards for photographs with the developer, whose brand has become one of the most recognisable in Nigeria’s housing sector.

But the most interesting part of these stories is not what the properties are worth today. It is what many of those buyers did after their first purchase. They came back. Again. And again.

Today, 19,750 customers have trusted us with a purchase. We have already delivered to 19,000 of them. And 15,000 have gone on to buy a second, third or fourth property from us. We did not have to convince them with another campaign. Their first experience did the convincing for us.

And that, perhaps more than anything else, tellsthe story of what we have been building all these years. Not just houses. Trust.

The market noticed too. Our ₦25 billion SEC-approved Commercial Paper Programme — most recently a ₦11.45 billion Series 2 issuance — was oversubscribed. Institutional and corporate investors were willing to put their money behind a company whose track record was no longer something we needed to explain. It was already standing across Lagos in concrete and glass.

As our Founder and CEO, Dr Richard Nyong, said recently: “Over the years, people have been asking what Lekki Gardens has been doing. Well, we felt it was necessary to take our time and deliver for people. We’ve had 19,750 customers. We’ve had 15,000 customers that bought multiple homes. As at this point, we have only 750 customers left to be delivered.”

So yes, we’ve been “exposed”. Guilty as charged.

Exposed for building in Ikoyi, Osborne, Ikeja GRA, Ikate, Oniru and beyond. Exposed for delivering homes to thousands of customers.

Exposed for helping investors create wealth.

And most importantly, exposed for turning first-time buyers into repeat customers. We were working the whole time. We just let the buildings speak first.